Funk, Casimir

Dr. Casimir Funk, who discovered that substances in food could
prevent or cure certain diseases. He called those substances
"vitamines."

[AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.]

Casimir Funk was born in Warsaw, Poland. The son of a dermatologist, Funk
earned a doctorate degree at the University of Bern, Switzerland, at the
young age of twenty. He then worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the
Wiesbaden Municipal Hospital in Germany, the University of Berlin, and the
Lister Institute in London.

Funk emigrated to the United States in 1915 and held several industrial
and university positions in New York. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen
in 1920. With funding provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, Funk
returned to Warsaw in 1923 to serve as the director of the Biochemistry
Department of the State Institute of Hygiene. Funk moved to Paris in 1927
and became a consultant to a pharmaceutical company and founded Casa
Biochemica, a privately funded research institution.

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Funk returned to the United
States to work as a consultant for the United States Vitamin Corporation.
He became the president of the Funk Foundation for Medical Research in
1940.

Funk's work with what are now called
vitamins
began when he recognized that certain food factors were needed to prevent
nutritional-deficiency diseases, such as beriberi (vitamin B
1
deficiency),
scurvy
(vitamin C deficiency), pellagra (
niacin
deficiency), and
rickets
(
vitamin D
deficiency). He suggested that these unidentified substances were all in
a class of organic compounds called
amines
, which are vital to life, so he named them vitamines (vital amines).
Although they turned out not to be amines, Funk's proposal (and the
coining of the term
vitamine
) has been called a stroke of genius. He later confirmed the existence of
vitamins B
1
, B
2
, C, and D, and he stated that they were necessary for normal health and
the prevention of deficiency diseases.

In his work to find the specific factor that prevented beriberi, Funk
eventually isolated nicotinic acid (niacin, or vitamin B
1
) from rice. Although it did not cure beriberi, scientists later
discovered that it cured pellagra. Funk also worked with the B-vitamin
thiamine, determining its molecular structure and developing a method for
synthesizing it.

In his later research, Funk studied animal
hormones
and contributed to the knowledge about hormones of the
pituitary
and sex glands, emphasizing the importance of balance between hormones
and vitamins. Funk also investigated the biochemistry of
cancer
,
diabetes
, and
ulcers
. He improved manufacturing methods for many commercial
drugs
and developed several new commercial products in his laboratories. He
died in Albany, New York, on November 20, 1967.